Embrace machine learning now. Artificial Intelligence is the Future of Dentistry.
Artificial intelligence in dentistry is nearing the end of the beginning: It’s been researched, introduced, proven to work, and it’s been put to use in real clinical settings. As usual, dentistry will be extremely slow to adopt this new technology. Dentistry has only explored the tip of the iceberg, but what is coming in the future of dentistry is dramatic improvement in patient care — from AI-directed diagnosis and treatment planning to controlling the handpiece.
In other domains of healthcare, hospitals are now moving beyond AI-based proof-of-concepts and program pilots into developing and adopting systems. AI in healthcare, as in other industries, began as a way to help these organizations manage their vast amounts of data and simplify daily tasks, but we’re starting to see the emergence of truly innovative uses of AI in healthcare — from finding complex patterns in medical imaging to genomic sequencing.
Additionally, there’s a huge interest in predictive clinical analytics, or the process of inputting historical patient data into models to identify and forecast future events, such as the likelihood of a patient relapse. In dentistry, managing risk and being able to predict the likelihood of recurrent caries and slow the progression of periodontal disease are not far away.
AI: The Future of Dentistry
The most common uses for AI in healthcare today are for search, classification and reasoning, in that order, according to Ajay Royyuru, vice president of healthcare and life sciences research at IBM Watson Health.
“AI is able to ingest massive amounts of data using technology such as text analytics and Natural Language Processing,” Royyuru said. “With that, AI systems are able to detect patterns and similarities within that data that may unlock new insights for clinicians and scientists. A system that can reason not only can identify but make recommendations or suggestions based on its trained parameters.”
Both IBM’s Watson for Genomics and Watson for Oncology are examples of state-of-the art AI systems currently available to doctors and scientists. In research, the Watson team is also working on a system that will take this classification and reasoning system to the next level by applying it to images. The project, called Medical Sieve, is working to use AI to identify instances of breast cancer and cardiac disease.
A small part of the huge AI space is focused on machine learning — the study of machines that improve with experience. Within machine learning, there is a sub-category where the learning of models is based on data – often Big Data derived from the digital “exhaust” of human intelligence and activity.
How will AI and machine learning affect dentistry and dental practice? I could be wrong, but given the speed of development of AI, coupled with machine-to-machine learning, dentistry’s transformation will be a “bullet train” — and the train has left the station. Diagnosis, treatment planning, handpiece manipulation, material selection, quality assurance and best practices on the clinical side are quickly approaching.
How Will Patients be Affected?
Patient marketing and management will also be affected: office design, staffing, scheduling, billing, account management (receivables and payables). Every aspect of practice administration will have some component of AI working with and inside it.
As usual, as the majority of dentists are ultra-conservative — and their political and clinical organizations are protective of the past — they are not seeing the tremendous impact of the most disruptive of any technology to date, which is AI. But there are few dentists, dentist-entrepreneurs, capitalists, and large group practices that realize that incorporating AI into their clinical and administrative practices will yield a huge competitive advantage.
For one thing, there is now a growing push to use AI to realize healthcare’s “Triple Aim”: better outcomes, reduced costs, and better accessibility. For better outcomes, we’ll soon see AI-powered tools that empower clinicians; for example, by reducing the time and effort needed to do record-keeping or by automating the most time-consuming aspects of their work. We will also see AI tools that make it possible for clinicians to stay abreast of the exponentially increasing amount of new medical science being published.
AI also will enable patients to access and take control of their own dentistry. We already see the start of this with Microsoft’s Healthbot, where patients can, anytime and anywhere, converse with an intelligent health agent, go through an efficient triage, and then get intelligently handed off to a nurse or physician in a way that is more efficient, lower cost and more satisfying. With imaging, electronic patient records and clinical data, dental patients will gain tremendous leverage in their choices for dental care.
Dentistry thinks it has time to adjust to AI. But when you take the human being out of the equation and machines can talk and learn from each other, it’s “game over.”
We have barely scratched the surface of AI, and there are still so many mysteries that consume the thoughts and actions of AI researchers around the world. Almost every practical application of AI today in dentistry is inside a tiny bubble — and this bubble is about to burst.
— Marc
